


half as beautiful, too

by takingyournarrative



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Other, Songfic, but it’s sure based on a song, i think, not actually sure what technically qualifies as a songfic, with a vaguely hopeful ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-15
Updated: 2021-01-15
Packaged: 2021-03-13 04:09:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28772130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/takingyournarrative/pseuds/takingyournarrative
Summary: It was the door and the door was impossible angles and it stood in it and laughed because it was awful and beautiful and everything that had ever given it a purpose had been ripped apart and lashed back together less than before.It was pointless and nameless and it was going to find Gerry Keay.in which Michael’s love is unmoved, i guess
Relationships: Gerard Keay/Michael Shelley, Gerard Keay/Michael | The Distortion
Comments: 14
Kudos: 54





	half as beautiful, too

**Author's Note:**

> *yells about how hozier’s as it was is literally just the gm narrative pre and post distortion*

Something was pulsing under the forest floor. Fathoms under, maybe, in the ice-water caves carved into the roots of the mountain, a steady thrum of life, or half-life, or something that hadn’t been life to begin with. More a concept than a creature. The suggestion of being swallowed whole by something that would scarcely notice. But the jungle was warm, the air stirred by the barest idea of a breeze, a soft thick blanket over Sannikov Land. 

It must have rained; the pathway up the mountain, which twisted and shrunk in on itself and expanded into wide lichen-patched swaths that Michael could almost get lost in, was muddy, choked all round with greenery. Great heavy leaves that shifted just over his head. Foxglove hovering off between the trees, silent purple sentinels. Everything swayed. The mountain swayed. Michael was lightheaded with altitude and promises of danger and heroism and a story to tell Gerry on his return. 

Beautiful, the island. Exquisite the way water dripped crystalline from the high canopy of the jungle, the way the sand had been warm under his feet when he stepped off the boat. The bitter wind of the ocean evaporated almost in a fog between the landing and the beach, and Michael’s cheeks — red-bitten with the sacrifice of his scarf — flushed instead with warmth. It felt like summer and the advent of spring at once. 

Fear was difficult, here, and he knew at the back of his mind that that should worry him; he remembered the press of Gerry’s hands on the sides of his face, the fierce warning not to trust — not Gertrude, not Sannikov Land, not anything. He remembered but the memory was vague and the air smelled sweet and a bit intoxicating. An edge to it, a sharp undertone that changed and shifted and threatened in a way that he could only describe as lovely.

But when they broke the trees the things at the top of the mountain were impossible, horrible, grinning and wonderful and repulsive. A thousand thousand faces that looked without eyes and saw Michael and laughed and laughed and laughed and nothing, nothing was real, and the foxglove crept dancing, twisting out of the forest to hover at the edges of the trees; and he could feel his mind slipping as everything collapsed.

_ Miss Robinson _ , he said or thought or said or maybe it didn’t matter,  _ what do I do?  _ Gertrude — or something else that looked like Gertrude, maybe, through the dizzy singing of the trees and the ideas that swarmed over the harsh rocky mountain peak — smiled at him, grim and familiar. She pointed.

The thing that grew from the stone of the mountaintop was not real. Impossible. His mind thought  _ Escher  _ and his eyes rebelled, knew that it was different, worse, that if anyone had tried to put this down on paper they would have sickened and died or fallen into it and become a screaming, aching part of the pencil scratches they had tried to call an altar.

It was, he knew. Spires and hands and roofs and veins and scales and staircases and love and spirals and the opposite of a name and the truth of a lie and knocking-at-the-door and not a door but a presence, a sharp glowing presence in the middle of the mass. 

Gertrude, of course, pointed at the door. Pressed a map into his hands. Told him to open it. 

Who was Michael Shelley to refuse? The foxglove laughed bright pink and green and the sound swarmed through the air and kissed his shoulders and pressed him forward. He was breaking, shutting down, and glass was shattering in the windows of the altar and grinning things were pretending to be real but Michael wasn’t and he had smiled enough times to know it was probably a lie. 

If there were tears on his face when he turned the doorknob they were blue and a gold that burned acidic through his cheeks and he noticed in the way a headache is noticeable after three hours of sleep.

Nothing slept here, but it was possible he was going to die. There was too much shouting in his mind to really consider it as a concrete thing, but he wondered if he’d lived enough. He didn’t think so, if he thought anything anymore. There was a book sprawled open on the nightstand at home. He’d left candy wrappers on his desk at the Institute. He hadn’t kissed Gerry last time they stood on the bridge in the park because there would be more chances and Gerry had been reading to him, some long poem that they only read outside and which they’d never had the chance to finish. The memories were real but the more he thought on them the more they weren’t, and the foxglove which had grown grinning eyes and weeping smiles twined around the bedposts and nodded eagerly along from under the bridge to the sound of Gerry’s voice.

Inside the door he followed the map, let the last fractured parts of his mind move to the twisting lines like a broken compass needle following a false north. His hands were bleeding where he had broken mirrors and his arms were bruised from bumping into doorframes and the bruises were pink like foxgloves and glowed from somewhere underneath them and when finally, finally he found the heart of the thing that was the heart of the altar he tore it open and all that light that had been building and bleeding under his skin scrambled out and ate him.

His heart shrieked and there were needles under his skin and gouging through his ribs and everything was light and color and light and light and light. Colors that weren’t, brighter than neon, false and beautiful and he was breaking in the most exquisite way, and then he was not Michael and nobody else was anywhere.

There had been more of them. The others were gone, gone like a boy Michael or part of Michael had once known. Gone somewhere that wasn’t. Michael was alone in the falsified ruins of the altar and its hands were too long and its hair tumbed freely over his shoulders and it was lovely, yes, but it hurt so badly. 

It was the door and the door was impossible angles and it stood in it and laughed because it was awful and beautiful and everything that had ever given it a purpose had been ripped apart and lashed back together less than before. 

It was pointless and nameless and it was going to find Gerry Keay. 

The journey to Sannikov Land had been long but the hallways behind it wrenched and twisted the difference into nothing. There was a memory, fragmented and beaten like polished silver, of warm rough hands on his face and a low voice and his own in response —  _ I’ll be back in a few days, don’t worry about me  _ — and it giggled at that and turned to the doorway. 

The hallways were it and it belonged to the hallways and it knew a hundred names that had never been its, but the glass burned like melting adoration and its fingers curled long around every doorframe. Michael Shelley had never been high but he might have imagined it was something like this, bruised purple neon and heavy lights and a floating gravity that took time and space between its hand and the doorknob and did not so much shatter as stretch and mold them. 

Dark and light moved in inexplicable patterns behind its eyes — behind them, literally, swirling in the space, if there was such a space, between the incorporeal tissue of its eyeballs and the quiet thing it had instead of a skull. Shape where there should be void, color where there was no light, and blackness everywhere the blinding sun on the sea shot back through its pupils and touched its insides. It burned. It froze him, the ice of the sea pressing, pushing up against his heart, washing it in the ocean swirling in its chest cavity, until it all shifted and collapsed in on itself and Michael was the door again, straight-edged and many-angled, sinuous, impossible. 

Still. It was looking for Gerry. It wanted Gerry Keay back in its arms; it wanted Gerry Keay’s voice in its ear and it wanted to kiss the little eyes tattooed across his fingers and it wanted to feel him shiver under its touch and it wanted to watch him push his tangled hair out of his face while he worked.

But it didn’t know. It didn’t know who it was, or what it was, or whether the thing it was now wanted Gerry or if that was just an echo of the person or the thing or the idea that it used to be. If anything of that person was left in it — if so, that person longed for Gerry; that person was Gerry’s nearly as much as he was his own, and Michael had taken him from himself and now they were both adrift. Gerry was a point of certainty, at least.

So it was going to Gerry Keay and if he would have it, Michael would stay.

It could feel him on the other side of the door. That harsh buzzing energy, almost frantic, that was in him always — always, because it had to be, because Gerry was  _ ready _ , constantly, for something horrible and unnamed. That energy that had converted, sometimes, rarely, around Michael Shelley, into something gentler and more focused. The intensity that was all that fear and anger turned away from itself, made soft, molded by a dual affection into the sweetest kind of adoration. Sweet like honey, sweet like a pomegranate, sweet like Gerry’s mouth on Michael’s and kindnesses that he had swallowed eagerly, starved for someone else’s affection turned for once on him.

It was worried, now, about that intensity. It saw its hands, bending and twisting and longer than they ought to be. In the corners of its vision its hair twitched and undulated, a million million strands winding and tangling through some will that was not its own. It knew what Gerry would see, and it knew what he did to things like it. The Spiral held it, or had a hold on it, or maybe it didn’t matter, because Gerry would see that and destroy it either way. 

Maybe it would be worth it, to see him again. Maybe it would rather be attacked than not touched at all. It opened the door.

For a long time, Gerry only stared at it. He was beautiful. Michael remembered him now — it had never forgotten him, but the memories had been broken, hazy, uncertain. He was exquisite, and Michael could remember the pattern of freckles that spread from the corner of his mouth to the angle of his jaw to the scattering like dropped stars along his collarbone, and it could remember the precise fade of his hair from its natural color to cheap plasticky black, and it could remember the way his lips felt dry and cracked, more so at the height of winter. 

“Hello, beloved,” said Michael.

“What the  _ fuck  _ are you?” said Gerry.

Shaking. His voice, his hands where he was trying to steady them in his lap. Michael recognized that. He was afraid. It wanted to take his hands, press them between its own, steady them. 

“I am Michael,” it said, uselessly, pointlessly, because it was not.

“No,” said Gerry. It shrugged.

The doorway shuddered. The hallways sang like a drunk cicada until it shut them up. Some stray winter bird sang outside the window and a car backfired down the street.

“Please,” said Gerry, and it looked a question at him. It didn’t know what he wanted. “Please tell me — tell me he’s dead. Don’t … don’t play games with me. I’m begging you to just tell me he’s gone.”

“Dead?” said Michael. “No. Gone? Perhaps. He … is me.” 

“God, no. No, no, no. Please.”

“How long has it been?” asked Michael. “How long have you been waiting?”

“It — I — I wasn’t  _ waiting _ . You — he was  _ gone.  _ He was dead … he’s supposed to be dead, not … oh, god, are you suffering?” 

Gerry was crying. Michael hated it. 

It laughed. “What a question. I asked first, sweet one.”

“A month,” said Gerry, and it stopped laughing, because it had reckoned time worse than it had thought, ripped its fingers through the thin nonlinear tissue just a bit too quickly.

“I am sorry,” it said.

“Don’t.”

It was quiet. It didn’t know what to say, or how, because Gerry Keay was beautiful and miserable and there were tears smudging the dark makeup on his face, and if it were Michael it would brush them away, kiss him soft and patient until he laughed, but it was not Michael, it was  _ Michael _ , and it didn’t know if Michael was left in it at all — the dregs of him, the memory — or if that was a lie it was telling itself to convince him better.

_ Will you take me for a lie? Will you have me for whatever ruined shreds of a human being are knotted to my veins?  _

What it asked was: “Can I kiss you?”

He stared at it. “No.” Flat, dispassionate.

Sickness uncoiled in the hard multifaceted rock it called the pit of its stomach; the glassy surface cracked and dissolved and bubbles shattered their way to its throat and spilled over in laughter, short bursts that tangled together and ran at last, a river from his mouth, and he hated it and let it trail off in contented sighs and said “very well, little flame. I will see you again.”

And it left. It didn’t know where to go or what to do, and it didn’t know how to be Michael Shelley.

It tried. In the swimming petri dish it called a void it pressed itself small, made itself soft. Wrapped warm falsely-knitted approximations of sweaters around its twitching shoulders and gave itself a voice that did not echo and hair that only strayed as far as an ordinary head would allow. It felt trapped and wrong and its mind, such as it was, stretched open like an egg sac hatching, a sore tearing, a bubble expanding before it popped. It ate it, and when it was real and false again its fingers shuddered more violently with too many bones.

So it could not be Shelley. But it was more certain than ever that part of it was — it had his memories, it  _ was  _ his memories, and it pressed them against its heart until they seared their images there, soft ashy burns on yellow-painted wood.    
It opened its heart and stepped over the threshold and greeted Gerry Keay again.

“Michael,” he said, and he sounded defeated.

“Hello,” said Michael. “I have understood myself for you, beloved.”

Gerry looked up at it. He looked heavy. “What do you mean?”

“I do not know.” It chuckled, rueful, a wisp of a sound. “I doubt I ever will. But if I cannot be your Michael Shelley, I am at least … I have, at least, some part of him. I believe. And if I do not the lie is so effective even I believe it.” It broke off again in giggles. Composed itself. “So. If I were — if I am —” it sighed. Tried again. “If some of him remains in me, will you take it? Wait long enough to find it. Stay with me. I will love you — I love you. Would you try — please — to do the same again for me?”

The words cost it an effort. Truth was like that, and it hated it.

Gerry stood up. Hovered at the edge of the couch, miserable and wretched, a ghost in a grey shirt with soot-dust shadows on his face. “Even now? Like this?”

“ _ Oh _ , Gerry.” It held out a hand, which he did not take. “Always. Like this — like anything, I love you.”

He was watching it. It could feel his gaze, its gravity, the way he was searching it and failing to see or understand anything. It could feel the way he wanted to. 

Michael was very still in the doorway and the light spilled wrong across the living room floor and lapped against the toes of Gerry Keay’s boots.

Gerry Keay, whose eyes were filled again with tears threatening to spill clear trails down his cheeks, clear because he had not bothered to put on makeup. Gerry Keay who looked like he loved Michael, and looked like he doubted Michael, and looked so terribly lonely.

“Show me,” he said at last, and Michael moved all at once — too quickly, and Gerry held up a hand. “Or just … tell me something. Talk about yourself. Fuck, come here,” and he curled up on the corner of the couch, pressed his little dark-clothed body into the corner between the cushion and the arm rest and waved to the other end of the seats. “Tell me about your day.”

Michael smiled, and it knew the grin was too wide and too eager and too hungry, but it sat anyway and looked at him. 

“Michael Shelley thought of you the entire time,” it said, and shook its head. “And the Spiral is bright and beautiful but not half so lovely as you — and when the singing cliffs crash against one another and their harmonies are cacophony, that rhythm and song is yours, and when the black star crumbles like ash and hardens into diamond, that fierceness is you, and the dance of the lights in their eyes and the procession of the foxglove in the tender-burning jungle is you, and the ice against the dark water was you and the cold in his bones was not half as good as the warmth of your touch and those shivering hours between light and light were exquisite for being a fraction of your loveliness. He could have seen a thousand universes expand and collapse and build themselves from nothing or whatever they could find and it would not have shaken the one you loved, Gerry Keay. You were in his mind and his eyes and his jungle and his terror and maybe he opened the door because it is my heart, and his heart, and by association, you. I do not know. But I am him, or he is me, or we are neither of us the other but someone else entirely.” A beat. “I will be silent now.”

Gerry wept. Held out a hand.

Michael took it and felt him flinch, but when it moved to draw back he held tighter, and in a minute Gerry Keay was in his arms. It was possible he wouldn’t stay, but for now he trembled there until he fell asleep. 

He was small. And radiant. The stars over Sannikov Land still hummed in the hollow above Michael’s defunct heart and it felt them reaching, little loving voids, for Gerry, who was beautiful and wonderful and the definition of adoration.

It let them. They were a part of it, and nothing that was Michael could cause him harm.


End file.
